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MIT recently announced a program with schools in Beijing and Shanghai to office a new master of science management degree. Boston’s academic atmosphere is such that it can make these types of connections with other global cities such as Shanghai and Beijing. Boston’s institutions are global, and on par with the top universities around the world. This program will help foster creative business managers who will undoubtedly work with academics and industry professionals to bring research to industry.

MIT Sloan to partner with world’s top business schools in new degree program

With the current economic upheaval making even clearer the links between global and national economies, the MIT Sloan School of Management is launching a collaboration with a select set of the world’s top business schools to offer highly talented management students a chance to supplement their learning — and to earn a degree at MIT.

“The world needs more, not fewer, smart people who are trained to be leaders in management, especially now,” said David Schmittlein, the John C. Head III Dean of MIT Sloan. The new program, which creates a master of science in management studies at MIT, “will enable students to supplement the broad-based management education they receive in the outstanding MBA programs at the schools they already attend with the additional knowledge and management tools they can acquire at MIT.” The degree program, Schmittlein added, is an important component of MIT Sloan’s ongoing efforts to build broad-based relationships with leading management schools, including the four participating in the program.

The new MIT degree designation will begin in the 2009-2010 academic year, with approximately 15 international students and an eventual enrollment of 50.

MIT already offers several master of science specifications. The new addition builds upon MIT Sloan’s deep and varied ties to leading educational institutions around the world. “We are pleased to partner with MIT Sloan in this new double-degree program, which will enhance the capacity of our institutions to be the leading international players in educating truly global business leaders,” said Bernard Ramanantsoa, dean of HEC Paris, a leading European business school.

The new degree program, said MIT Sloan Senior Associate Dean Alan White, “supports our global collaborations, which are all about insuring our continued presence as a global university.”

Robert C. Klemkosky, dean of the SKK Graduate School of Business at Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University, termed the new program “one of the most significant events in the development of management education, not only at SKK GSB, but in Korea. It further strengthens the five-year collaboration between MIT Sloan and SKK GSB.”

MIT Sloan Deputy Dean Steven D. Eppinger said MIT Sloan faculty and students will benefit as well. “With business more global than ever, we need to do all we can to encourage connections between our faculty and students and those of some of the best management schools in the world,” he said. “This initiative will offer our partner schools the opportunity to provide their students, who have received their MBA education in one region of the world, with additional specialization in business education at MIT Sloan.”

Participating institutions in the new degree program also include Tsinghua University in Beijing and Fudan University in Shanghai. Schmittlein noted an additional benefit for both Sloan and its academic partners. “This new degree program further strengthens our relationships with four of the most distinguished educational institutions in the world,” he said. “It is a win-win for the partner schools, for MIT Sloan, and for all of our students and faculty.”

Hansjorg Wyss is a living example of the proptype of the Boston education-industry system. He graduated and became an innovator in his field, and took his work to industry where he experienced phenomenal economic success. His gift will bring to together scientists, engineers, and clinicians who will create an innovative and collaborative atmosphere at Harvard. This interdisciplinary attitude will contribute to the Boston area as a whole.

Alumnus’ gift to advance the field

OCTOBER 5, 2008

Engineer, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Hansjörg Wyss MBA ’65 has given Harvard University $125 million to create the Hansjörg Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

Investigators at the Wyss Institute (pronounced “Vees”) will strive to uncover the engineering principles that govern living things, and use this knowledge to develop technology solutions for the most pressing healthcare and environmental issues facing humanity. Wyss’ gift is the largest individual gift in the University’s history.

“I am deeply grateful to Hansjörg Wyss for this gift, which will allow Harvard to make a transformational investment in powerful, collaborative science,” said Harvard President and Lincoln Professor of History Drew Faust. “The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering will form the bedrock for Harvard’s emerging efforts in this critical area and will affect research, teaching, and the training of future leaders in this field.

“We regard this gift as an enormous vote of confidence by a donor who is both extraordinarily generous and extraordinarily knowledgeable in this field,” Faust continued. “This gift underscores Harvard’s ability to lead and to make very significant contributions in a field that is of increasing importance to scientists in a number of areas, and to science more generally.”

The Wyss Institute will be a collaborative enterprise bringing together experimentalists, theoreticians, and clinicians with expertise in engineering, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer science, robotics, medicine, and surgery from Harvard’s Schools and affiliated hospitals, as well as from neighboring universities.

Wyss’ gift will provide funds for seven endowed faculty positions, as well as major operating funds for the institute. The locus of the Wyss Institute will be in the first science complex currently under construction on Harvard’s campus in the Allston neighborhood of Boston.

“I am humbled to have the opportunity to contribute in a meaningful way to efforts that I firmly believe will change the future course of science and medicine,” Wyss said. “Little did I dream when I began my career in engineering that we would reach a point where engineers and biologists would be using nature’s templates to create solutions to our medical and environmental challenges.”

“Hansjörg Wyss’ vision for the potential inherent in newly emerging areas of bioengineering will allow Harvard to integrate the worlds of biology and engineering to develop nontraditional solutions to seemingly insurmountable challenges,” said Hyman. “Don Ingber’s leadership and commitment to exploring these possibilities will make this vision a reality.”

Hyman noted that the establishment of the Wyss Institute follows Harvard’s “commitment to the overall growth of engineering at Harvard — exemplified by changing the status of the former Division of Engineering to a School of Engineering — but in the context of a liberal arts-focused research institution. With respect to bioengineering in particular, we are at a wonderful intellectual inflection point where we’re beginning to see a new generation of bioengineering in which I think no one has an advantage, and where we will provide very substantial intellectual partnerships for such activities as ourStem Cell Institute and for the Systems Biology activities. Those partnerships might, for example,” he said, “enable us to convert new basic discoveries into a host of treatments for human beings suffering with illnesses.”

In expressing his gratitude to Wyss, Ingber said that “Hansjörg Wyss is a visionary engineer and entrepreneur who understands that transformative change requires risk-taking and breaking down boundaries among existing disciplines. We are indebted to him for his generosity, which will enable engineers, scientists, physicians, and industrial collaborators to work across institutions and disciplines at a level never before possible in an academic setting.”

David Mooney, Gordon McKay Professor of Bioengineering at SEAS and co-chair of Harvard’s bioengineering working group, said, “I am particularly excited that this gift will allow us to create an interdisciplinary community of scholars who will work together to both develop novel technologies and create a foundation for bioengineering based on a fundamental knowledge of how living systems function.”

PURPOSE AND MISSION

The mission of the Hansjörg Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering is to discover the engineering principles that nature uses to build living things, and to harness these insights to create biologically inspired materials, devices, and control technologies to address unmet medical needs worldwide and bring about a more sustainable world.

Over the past decade in particular, engineering, biology, medicine, and the physical sciences have increasingly converged. Through revolutionary advances in nanotechnology, genetics, and cell engineering, it is now possible to manipulate individual atoms, genes, molecules, and cells one at a time, and to create artificial biological systems. Simultaneous progress in materials science, molecular biology, and tissue engineering has enabled scientists to develop synthetic materials, microdevices, and computational strategies to manipulate cell function, guide tissue formation, and control complex organ physiology. As a result of these developments, the boundary between living and nonliving systems is beginning to break down.

The Wyss Institute will leverage these advances and facilitate new breakthroughs by advancing the science and engineering necessary to develop biomimetic materials, microdevices, microrobots, and innovative disease-reprogramming technologies that emulate how living cells and tissues self-organize and naturally regulate themselves. A deeper understanding of how living systems build, recycle, and control also will ultimately lead to more efficient bioinspired ways of converting energy, controlling manufacturing, improving the environment, and creating a more sustainable world.

FACULTY AND PROGRAMS

The Wyss Institute will form a community of engineers, scientists, and clinicians, and provide them with the resources necessary to pursue innovative, multidisciplinary, forward-looking research that will spur the development of transformative new technologies and therapies.

The institute will focus on fundamental, science-driven technology development in the newly emerging fields of synthetic biology, biological control, and living materials.

The Synthetic Biology Program will develop genetically engineered component parts and circuits necessary to build programmable self-assembling nanomaterials and integrated multifunctional living microdevices.

The Biological Control Group will devise control strategies that can “reboot” diseased tissues and organs, as well as biologically inspired algorithms for robotic control.

The Living Materials Program will harness the design principles that govern how living cells, tissues, and organs exhibit their novel material properties and coupled biocatalytic functions, with the goal of fabricating self-organizing biomimetic materials and devices for both medical and nonmedical applications.

The Wyss Institute will also incorporate an Advanced Technology Core, composed of technical experts with extensive expertise in genetic engineering, nanotechnology, microfabrication, materials science, and other critical technologies, who move among different faculty laboratories pursuing problems until they are solved and useful technologies are created. The institute’s faculty will translate these new technologies into commercial products and therapies through partnerships with industrial and clinical collaborators. The Wyss Institute also will support clinical faculty researchers who will identify critical clinical challenges, conduct research and development activities necessary to solve these problems, and help to bring these technologies back into the clinic. Such an environment, free of disciplinary boundaries, will foster the training of a new generation of students and fellows who fully understand how to work across disciplines, and how to learn from the power of nature’s innovations to advance bioengineering and medicine.

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